Online social networks are the universal mechanism to connect people and information in logical and organized ways which enable sharing and processing of information between the users. The most common mechanisms of sharing and processing of information is the inbox, wall, activity stream, timeline, or profile.
One of the most frequent types of social sharing is done via recommendations (e.g., Likes, Thumbs Up, Multi Modal Recommendations such as star ratings, emojis indicating likes/dislikes, etc.). Recommendations drive a wealth of discovery in online social networks, and in object/product centric views (e.g., a product page on site Amazon.com). Some recommendations often suffer/contain instant-read bias, where a user quickly scans over a few lines or frames of a video, and decides to either recommend or not recommend the video (e.g., down vote or up vote the video).
Recommendations are a powerful tool for agreeing or disagreeing to the mode of a topic, sharing a topic with others, commenting on a topic, or promoting a topic. Recently, however, marketing entities have begun to leverage the powerful tool to self-promote through the interconnected recommendation and social network systems so that they can drive success of their products. This practice is often referred to as astroturfing; astroturfing is the act of making an effort appear to be organic and grassroots based.